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By Root 1186 0

the man who sat in his old place, facing him across the Speaker’s table, was not. Campbell-Bannerman was impervious, as a colleague said, to the “historic charm” of Balfour; “he simply could not see it.” Early in the session he tried to puncture its spell. Required to state his party’s position on a resolution against Tariff Reform, Balfour managed an evasion as ambiguous as of old, exasperating the Prime Minister. “Enough of this foolery!” C.-B. burst out. His predecessor was “like the old Bourbons—he has learnt nothing. He comes back with the same airy graces, the same subtle dialectics, the same light and frivolous way of dealing with a great question but he little knows the temper of the new House of Commons if he thinks these methods will prevail here. I say enough of this foolery!” It was a doughty effort, widely quoted, but it did not dispel the Balfour aura.

The real temper of the new House was represented by a different kind of man than either Balfour the patrician or C.-B. the old-fashioned Liberal. The two dominant figures of the new Government, each of whom was to serve in succession as Prime Minister, were both men for whom government was not an inherited function but a professional career. They were H. H. Asquith, son of a Nonconformist Yorkshire wool merchant, and David Lloyd George, son of a Welsh schoolteacher. In background and temperament totally dissimilar, they had both made their way to Parliament through the practice of law.

The most dynamic of the new ministers, Lloyd George had been named President of the Board of Trade, not one of the chief Cabinet posts but one that gave him Front Bench rank. In him A. G. Gardiner, editor of the Daily News and a particularly perceptive student of political character, saw “the portent of a new age—the man of the people in the seat of power.” If not yet in ultimate power, Lloyd George was obviously on his way to it and his purpose was as clear as that of a fox in a hen coop. He was forty-two, eleven years younger than Asquith and eleven years older than Churchill. Sent to Parliament in 1890 by a borough in Wales in the cause of Welsh nationalism, he was a Nonconformist dedicated to Disestablishment and a Radical dedicated to social reform. His political bible as a young man was Les Misérables, which he carried with him in a shilling paper edition whenever he traveled. His stand against the Boer War at the risk of professional boycott and actual assault took moral as well as physical courage. He had strong political principles but no scruples. Small and handsome, fearless, ruthless, and honey-tongued, with bright blue eyes, brown moustache and intense vitality, he constantly pursued and attracted women and adroitly avoided the occasional legal consequences. As a public speaker he was the Bernhardt of the political platform who ravished audiences with Celtic lilt and strong emotion. In public no rhetoric for him was too theatrical, no rabble-rousing too extreme; in office, however, he was circumspect and shrewd, conscious, as he used to say, that “England is based on commerce,” and that no party could live by appeal to Labour alone. His greatest gift was an acute, intuitive, unerring sense of what the moment demanded, coupled with the conviction that he was the man to supply it. He “swooped down on opportunity like a hawk,” and with it in his grasp, was a man whom the party leaders could not choose but use, even if like Chamberlain among the Tories, he was a cuckoo who would use them.

Ahead of him as Chancellor of the Exchequer was Asquith and coming up fast from behind, Winston Churchill, who had been given a sub-Cabinet post as Under-Secretary for the Colonies in reward for coming over from the Tories. Asquith was a professional intellectual machine who worked by training and judgment of what was expedient rather than by any fundamental primal belief. He was implacable in logic, irrefutable in debate. “Go and bring the sledgehammer,” ordered C.-B. on one occasion when Balfour was delicately slitting the Liberals to ribbons, and Asquith was duly sent for. A brilliant